Blue state. Blue governor. Abortion on the ballot. Piles of money for Democrats, and tons of energy too. From the outside, everything seems set up for a Democratic sweep in New York. On the inside, though, there are signs that the state’s constantly malfunctioning, often corrupt political machine is at some risk of glitching out—again. And if that crash is as catastrophic as some Democrats fear, it could give a future president Donald Trump the most pliable of MAGA partners in the US Congress as he takes on his enemies from within.
After the 2022 midterms, everyone from Nancy Pelosi on down has blamed sleepwalking New York Democrats (in general) and Governor Kathy Hochul (in particular) for losing a half-dozen or so winnable Congressional seats—and flipping the US House to Republicans. Local Democrats and their allies swore they’d get their shit together and take those seats back. All the pieces seemed to be in place to make it happen. Democrats had total control of state government, meaning they could redraw the Congressional district maps to their advantage. A yes vote on an Equal Rights Amendment to the state constitution would enshrine reproductive rights and just might drive up turnout. And in the state’s dominant media market, there was a new, tough-on-crime Democratic mayor with the résumé and the megaphone to win back shaky suburban voters.
Then things got, um, complicated. I’ll explain how in a bit. But the upshot is that many of the dozen New York Democratic operatives, candidates, and elected officials I spoke with are giving one-fingered salutes to each other, right at the moment you’d expect them to be focusing all their anger in the Republicans’ direction.
Nobody thinks Trump is going to win New York—at least, no one outside of that fashy three-ring circus he brought to Madison Square Garden the other day. Who will run Congress, though? That’s another matter. “I don’t think it’s been a time in decades when New York has played such a central role in the national election,” Manhattan Borough president Mark Levine tells me. “Control of the House of Representatives will be decided here based on the outcome of half a dozen competitive districts. And in case you were wondering whether that factored into the Trump campaign decision to do a rally at MSG, [Republican House Majority Leader] Mike Johnson came out and said it explicitly.”
In a normal political culture, New York City’s Democratic mayor would’ve pushed back hard against a Republican rally spewing so much racist bile. But this is New York in 2024, where Mayor Eric Adams is currently under indictment on corruption charges (he’s pleaded not guilty); anonymous sources with “direct knowledge of Adams’s legal strategy” told the Post that they’re hoping a reinstalled president Trump will make the “bullshit case” go away. Adams himself mildly rebuked one of the rally’s more offensive jokes—while taking a swipe at those who’ve called Trump a fascist, which includes Kamala Harris’s campaign. “With all that’s going on to everyday New Yorkers, we’re asking questions [like] is someone a fascist or is someone a Hitler. That’s insulting to me. That is insulting,” he said.
It’s part of an ongoing effort to turn down the temperature on campaign rhetoric, the mayor’s team insists. And if it seems rather unhelpful to Adams’s fellow Democratic politicos right now, some of the ones I spoke with found it to be a small improvement. “The only silver lining about the indictments of Eric Adams has been that he has stopped giving Republicans talking points and sound bites for their ads about what a hellhole New York is,” Alyssa Cass, a local Democratic strategist, tells me.
For the better part of two-and-a-half years, Adams, a former cop, has warned the city was teetering on chaos—even as the crime rate kept coming down. He railed against the influx of migrants, and warned that the cost of caring for them will “destroy New York.” And when the Adams administration needed a migrant arrival center, it took over the Roosevelt Hotel, right next to the commuter transit hub of Grand Central Station. Horrified suburbanites watched as migrants by the thousands were forced to wait out on the streets for care, and Adams declared that New York was “past our breaking point.”
Republican candidates and the conservative media ecosystem have portrayed Adams’s New York as a shorthand for out-of-control migration—and urban entropy. Candidates from both parties have spent more than $10 million in local political TV ads that touch on the migrant issue, according to the New York Times. In the Hudson Valley, north of the city, Representative Mike Lawler hit his Democrat opponent Mondaire Jones for “supporting Joe Biden and Eric Adams’s open border policy.” Never mind that Adams doesn’t control the border, and the mayor has routinely bashed Biden on the subject. Lawler’s campaign has bet that Adams—and Democrats—have become synonymous with migrant chaos in his voters’ minds. Adams himself helped make the connection. “Before anyone got on TV with these messages, Eric Adams was saying them for two years,” Cass tells me.
